You Asked; I Answered

So I got home from a weekend away and a surprising number of you have requested my thoughts on the SFWA petition, the forum re-posts, the libel suits, and the general wash of buffoonery that I missed while I was off the grid. I’ve read through the petition and here’s my takeaway:

“We miss the days when we could say whatever we wanted and people laughed and put up with it because we were elite and powerful and nobody dared object.”

I’ve read through the forum commentary as well. First, to be honest, I dropped from SFWA years ago, mostly because I found the secret forums to be awful to read. So many authors I had admired proved to have feet of clay, saying heinous things with apparent lack of remorse and complete equanimity. Given the way my own work was consistently marginalized, I decided the organization had little to offer other than dated attitudes and offensive remarks. I haven’t regretted letting my membership lapse. I haven’t missed finding barbs from people whose work I used to enjoy. That which was posted was about what I saw when I was a member, weighted by an inexplicable prejudice against youth and new ideas. Heavens forfend that people should treat one another with respect Period. That runs the gamut of race, gender, sexual orientation, culture, creed, etc. The people who shout the loudest against “political correctness” basically just want the old guard freedom to say horrendous things and to marginalize someone else without being made to feel bad for it. They cry censorship without having any real clue what the first amendment entails. Hint: it doesn’t apply to private organizations.

But anyone who’s stunned that the words they posted inside the secret clubhouse made it to the outside world? I suspect that person doesn’t understand the nature of the internet.

I’m not sure if this is the reaction you were looking for, dear readers, but for certain parties, this is business as usual. They dig and dig, never realizing they’re excavating their own graves with vitriol and bitterness, never acknowledging that their lack of relevance contributes to declining sales. Not all dinosaurs will become extinct in a catastrophic event. Some will just keep shouting into vacuum, puzzled as to why fewer and fewer people care about their message. Don’t we realize How Very Important They Are? Why, in the Old Days… Oh, right. In space, nobody can hear you whine.

I followed your post on twitter here. I don’t think I will follow the trail any further given I have also been online in forum culture for enough years that I don’t have to guess at what type of comments you mean. Sometimes you have to protect yourself from that ugly side of humanity that the internet seems to bring to light.

What’s interesting to me is when that veil of user anonymity is revealed, how people react. Just look at what the internet collective anonymous does; they expose truths. It may be revealed by nefarious means (hacking for example) but well, there really is no “secret” place on the internet. All it takes is someone clever enough to expose it.

Yep. There are always those willing to reveal the down and nasty by use of the internet. There are times that’s good and times it’s not. the mind boggles over all the whining and crap said on these forums. The nastiness is wearisome to the spirit. My philosophy is,be careful what you say in public and do the job of writing or whatever our jobs are.

Your last paragraph covers exactly the sad part of this I found myself having to write about last night. The idea not just that they would be, but that they can be gatekeepers in this era is so fundamentally out of touch with reality that it kind of boggles the mind. That era is over, but, as with the internet, they fundamentally do not understand that, and refuse to learn.

My favourite part of all of it, though, is the whole declaration of “the Young” – a direct quote – as the enemy, by a bunch of supposed futurists. Irony is already long dead, but any chance of revival through cloning just got wiped out for another decade.

I was honest to God shocked that anyone could be all *clutches pearls* over messages in a public forum being circulated. Like a friend said, if you don’t want people to quote your public statements, maybe don’t make them??